We have a great deal for which to
be grateful to Bampton Classical Opera, here making its annual staged visit to
St John’s, Smith Square. Who else is interested in this country is interested
in the broader hinterland of opera in, roughly, the second half of the
eighteenth century? Gluck, by any standards, one of the most important
composers in the history of opera, not just eighteenth-century opera, is all
but ignored by our ‘major’, non-touring companies, although English Touring
Opera offered a fine Iphigénie en Tauride
earlier this year. (I also plan to report from the new staging in Paris in
December.) If ‘reformist’ Gluck is so shamefully ignored, however, his earlier
and concurrent ‘non-reformist’ self suffers a fate worse still.

Giove (Christopher Turner)

And yet, the dividing lines are
not nearly so distinct as one might suspect. Filemone e Bauci, here sung in Gilly French’s English translation
as Philemon and Baucis, was actually
written as one act of a festa teatrale,
La feste d’Apollo – not unlike a
Ramellian opéra-ballet – whose final
act was a revised (shortened) version of Orfeo
ed Euridice. Intended for the 1769 wedding of Ferdinand, Duke of Parma, to
Maria Theresa’s daughter, Maria Amalia, there was a rich, personal operatic
past on which to draw, the Archduchess herself having sung in Viennese
performances of two earlier Gluck operas, Il
parnaso confuso (performed by Bampton forces in
2014) (as Apollo himself), and La corona. Gluck, moreover, for all the alleged purity of his
operatic æsthetic, was far from averse to reusing music elsewhere, and there is
some splendidly insane coloratura to be handled here too, no more banished to
the dustbin of operatic history than a good number of other aspects of
Metastasian opera seria. That La feste d’Apollo immediately followed Alceste – of the celebrated Preface –
counsels us against parroting too readily all manner of supposed
generalisations, turning points, and so forth, concerning operatic history. That
said, whilst Bauci’s one aria offers us coloratura to make the Queen of the
Night seem almost an amateur, the rest of Gluck’s style here is relatively
simple. As so often, the truth is more interesting, more complicated, than
received opinion would have us believe. We might know that in theory, of
course, but we also need opportunities to experience that in performance, such
as here.

It is not, perhaps, the most
dramatic of works, certainly of libretti, but Giuseppe Maria Pagnini’s libretto,
after Ovid, makes certain interesting modifications – I hesitate to say ‘metamorphoses’
– and Jeremy Gray’s production follows suit; both offer a setting for Gluck’s
opera to shine forth, playing with the distance between antiquity, the eighteenth
century and our time. Chez Pagnini,
Philemon and Baucis – I shall now use the English forms – are not an elderly
couple, but a pair of young lovers. They nevertheless show kindness beyond the
call of duty towards the disguised Jupiter, and, following a storm of divine
petulance, receive their priestly reward. Picking up on ideas of travel,
disguise, and liminality, the action takes place – not didactically, but with
an awareness of what a change of scene might do, to make us consider meaning –
in the strange, modern world of the airport: not an uninteresting substitution
for pastoral Phrygia. There can certainly be no doubting the helpfulness of these
particular honest airline employees.

Mercury (Robert Anthony Gardiner) and Paris (Christopher Turner)

That is also the world, with
different, yet related, designs for Thomas Arne’s The Judgment of Paris, Arne Air (‘no frills, plenty of trills’) itself
– perhaps – a disguised –version of something else. The work is a little
earlier than many, though by no means all, of Bampton’s works. To begin with, I
even thought that Arne’s 1742 setting of William Congreve’s competition-entry libretto
(1701) might have the edge over Gluck’s. It was a splendid opportunity to hear
such a rarity, of course, but, as time went on, and with no disrespect to Ian
Spink’s excellent Musica Britannica reconstruction of the dry recitatives and
chorus music, Arne’s music, superficially similar to Handel’s, became somewhat
predictable and perhaps stood in need of the occasional cut to admit of
dramatic flow: quite the opposite, then, to Gluck, whose virtues, as so often,
quietly crept up upon us. The witty presentation of Paris making his judg(e)ment
as a passenger upon divinely-conjured air hostesses again has the virtue of
permitting reflection, without forcing it upon us. Jupiter may be absent in
person, but his messenger, Mercury again offers another lightly worn connection
between works.

Baucis (Barbara Cole Walton)

The playing of CHROMA, under
Paul Wingfield, proved excellent throughout. We may have come to expect that,
but it is certainly not to be taken for granted. From the typically contrasting
material – and its dramatic implications – of Gluck’s Overture to the final
Arne chorus we were not only in safe, but colourful, harmonically aware hands,
well capable of permitting the operatic action to ‘Sing, and spread the joyful
News around’. Barbara Cole Walton proved every inch the star with that fiendish
coloratura writing from Gluck. As Arne’s Juno, she took her part in an
excellent team of competitors, her Juno complementing and contrasting with
Catherine Backhouse’s wise, yet far from un-sensual Pallas, also a rich-toned,
good-natured Philemon, and Aoife O’Sullivan’s spirited, highly characterful Venus.
Christopher Turner’s Paris (and Jupiter) revealed to us a sensitive, agile
tenor: many challenges here, met with formidable success. Robert Anthony
Gardiner’s Mercury also impressed, with similar vocal virtues, and a keen sense
of the stage. Members of the ensemble all made their mark. This was
unquestionably a company triumph; the next Bampton opera(s) is or are eagerly
awaited.